The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
Interpretation
A college education helps develop the ability to recognize good character in others.
William James emphasizes that the primary purpose of a college education extends beyond mere academic knowledge; it is about cultivating the discernment and judgment necessary to identify individuals of good character. This perspective suggests that education should contribute to a person's moral and ethical understanding, enriching their ability to navigate personal and professional relationships.
In practice
During a graduation speech to emphasize the value of education.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.
Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.
Nothing would please us more than to see our beloved children form the habit of reading the Gospels - not merely from time to time, but every day.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. [β¦] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
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